Alastiar Reynolds

REDEMPTION ARK

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Ace Books by Alstair Reynolds

REVELATION SPACE
CHASM CITY
REDEMPTION ARK

REDEMPTION ARK
Alastair Reynolds

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

REDEMPTION ARK

An Ace Book
Published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

Copyright © 2002 by Alastair Reynolds.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

First American edition: June
Previously published in Great Britain in 2002 by Gollancz.

ISBN 0-441-01058-X

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PROLOGUE

The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty.

Skade looped around it in a helical pseudo-orbit, her corvette’s thrusters drumming a rapid tattoo of corrective bursts. The starscape wheeled behind the ship, the system’s sun eclipsed and revealed with each loop of the helix. Skade’s attention had lingered on the sun for a moment too long. She felt an ominous tightening in her throat, the onset of motion sickness.

It was not what she needed.
Irritated, Skade visualised her own brain in glassy three-dimensional complexity. As if peeling a fruit, she stripped away layers of neocortex and cortex, flinging aside the parts of her own mind that did not immediately interest her. The silvery loom of her implant web, topologically identical with her native synaptic network, shimmered with neural traffic, packets of information racing from neuron to neuron at a kilometre per second, ten times faster than the crawl of biological nerve signals. She could not actually perceive those signals moving — that would have required an accelerated rate of consciousness, which would have required even faster neural traffic — but the abstraction nonetheless revealed which parts of her augmented brain were the most active.
Skade zoomed in on a specific locus of brain function called the Area Postrema , an ancient tangle of neural circuitry that handled conflicts between vision and balance. Her inner ear felt only the steady pressure of her shuttle’s acceleration, but her eyes saw a cyclically changing view as the background wheeled behind the ship. The ancient part of her brain could only reconcile that mismatch by assuming that Skade was hallucinating. It therefore sent a signal to another part of her brain that had evolved to protect the body from ingesting poisons.
Skade knew there was no point blaming her brain for making her feel nauseous. The hallucination/poison connection had worked very well for millions of years, allowing her ancestors to experiment with a wider diet than would otherwise have been possible. It just had no place here and now, on the chill, dangerous edge of another solar system. She supposed it would have made sense to erase such features by deftly rewiring the basic topology, but that was a lot easier said than done. The brain was holographic and messy, like a hopelessly overcomplicated computer program. Skade knew, therefore, that by ‘switching off the part of her brain that was making her feel nauseous, she was almost certainly affecting other areas of brain function that shared some of the same neural circuitry. But she could live with that; she had done something similar a thousand times before, and she had seldom experienced any cognitive side effects.
There. The culprit region pulsed pink and dropped off the network. The nausea vanished; she felt a great deal better.
What remained was anger at her own carelessness. When she had been a field operative, making frequent incursions into enemy territory, she would never have left it until now to make such a modest neural adjustment. She had become sloppy, and that was unforgivable. Especially now that the ship had returned: an event that might prove to be as significant to the